19  

“I STILL CAN’T BELIEVE IT. It isn’t like Cutthroat Cartwright to miss out that way. He ought to have snapped up the Rough Riders story like a wolf licking his chops.”

“Are you going to natter about that all night?” None the worse for wear—unlike me—after the day’s horseback adventures, Sandison was heartily tucking into his plateload of scalloped potatoes and veal parmigiana; stiff and sore as I was, cooking had to be done. Also for supper were the Thunder and the Post spread around on the table, more like a long wharf than ever with just the two of us docked at one end. “I don’t know what’s the matter with you. You achieve a whatchamacallit, swoop—”

“‘Scoop’ is the honored journalistic term.”

“—and you sit around maundering about why the other fellow didn’t get it instead of you. Can’t stand good luck, ay? Pass the spuds.”

“I am only saying, it’s mysterious.”

“Yes, yes, the dog that didn’t bark, we’ve all read our Sherlock Holmes, never mind. It’ll become clear or it won’t.” With that profundity, he turned back to the Thunder front page, with the splashy headline Bronc Goes on Hennessy Shopping Spree and accompanying photograph. I still had trouble believing the evident daredevil in the saddle was me. “Not that I mean to criticize,” Sandison pontificated, studying the photo, “but when the pony takes to the air like that, you really should hang on to the saddle horn instead of your hat.”

“I must remember that the next time I mount up on Pegasus.” That retort flew by him, as he returned to the newspaper while forking down his meal, sturdy as a Viking while I ached from the bottom up. It occurred to me that in all the confusion and deadline rush, I had not managed to express my appreciation for his holding the flame-wielding culprit at gunpoint. “Ah, thank you for riding shotgun, so to speak.”

“Hmm?” He barely glanced up. “Seemed like a good idea if you were anywhere in the vicinity.” Favoring his side, he reached for his coffee cup with a wince. “What is it about you? I spent my whole ranch life around people armed to the teeth and never got shot.”

“You would think,” I said wearily, “guns should be as allergic to me as I am to them. Balance of nature, that sort of thing.”

This drew me the observation that I was an optimist, which did not seem to qualify as a compliment in Sandison lexicon. Pushing his practically gleaming plate away and untucking his napkin, he leaned back with a groan and addressed the ceiling. “I know what I’d do, though, if a bunch of idiots was gunning for me and setting fire to my horse and so on.”

You sit up and pay attention when the Earl of Hell offers advice on matters of that sort.

“I’d let it be known something nasty could happen to them as well as to me,” he drawled, lowering his gaze as if sighting in on me. “Someone in particular, to get their attention.”

“Threaten Cartwright, you mean.”

“An eye for an eye. Right there in the Bible, heh.”

I swallowed hard. “Sandy, I don’t think I have it in me to even the score that way. Do I look remotely homicidal?” A sigh from across the table answered that. “Cutlass is unfortunately as sharp as that damnable pen name. He would know in a flash I was bluffing.”

“Think straighter than that, man. All sorts of unpleasant things might happen to someone like him that aren’t necessarily fatal.” He steepled his fingers, evidently pondering the list. “Butte after dark can be a lively place,” he plucked an example. “A person could accidentally get into an altercation with someone rowdy. A muscular miner or two, for instance.” His gaze lofted off again. “I’m only saying, that could be pointed out to the pertinent person.”

Now I was the one pondering, deeply. The bearded old figure across the table had taken a bullet for me and similarly performed heroically in the horseback episode. He could hardly be blamed for wanting to head off any more such incidents. Even besides him, everyone else near and dear to me—Grace, Jared and Rab, Russian Famine, Hoop and Griff, the embattled Thunder staff—was bearing some kind of brunt of Anaconda’s machinations. And there was always the ghost of Quin, the question mark hovering around his death.

The more I thought about it, the straighter the thinking became, as Sandison prescribed. Why should Cutthroat Cartwright waltz into town to do Anaconda’s dirty work and be left spotless? My verdict did not come easily, but it came.

“I’ll put the matter to Jared Evans—he no doubt has some way of getting the message across to Cartwright that he had better watch his step,” I met Sandison’s terms with all the determination I could muster. “I take your point, about being on the receiving end of gunshots and equine high jinks and all. Satis superque.”

For whatever reason—would I ever understand the outsize bearlike book-loving string-’em-up personality across from me?—the Latin tickled him into a rollicking belly laugh. “‘Enough and more than enough,’” he wheezed. “Well said, my boy. You have a touch when you half try.”

In high good humor now, he poured himself some more coffee and did the same for me, rather a stretch for his usual contribution to our mealtimes. “By the way, figure me into breakfast tomorrow. Bacon and three or four eggs and a stack of hotcakes will do.”

Seeing my surprise at this departure from his routine of breakfasting only with his books, he said defensively, “Don’t drop your teeth. A man has to stoke up a bit to get back on the job, doesn’t he?”

“Back on the—? You don’t mean downtown, surely.”

“Unless it’s been moved in my absence, that’s where the public library is.”

“But you’re still nursing your wound.”

“Am not,” he said crossly. He tried unsuccessfully to sit up straight without wincing. “Bit of a stitch in my side, is all.”

“Minutes ago you were describing that to me as a nearly lethal bullet.”

“You’re worse than Dora ever was for nagging,” he grumbled. “Don’t you see, I have to get down there and tend to the collection. There’s a board of trustees meeting coming up and I need to have things patted into place.”

I saw, all right, as if a veil had been lifted by a corner. He had to make sure the mingled budgetary funds that steadily nourished the finest book collection west of Chicago—and thanks to the judicious use of the paste pot in his office, grew the number of rare volumes with his SSS bookplate in them—did not show any loose ends. “It’s time I picked up the reins again,” he said smoothly. “Though I’m sure you did the best you could filling in for me.”

Buried in that was the fact that he would go to any length for his beloved books, even entrusting their care to me. No matter how cantankerously he put it, I was deeply moved. So much so that I could no longer hold the secret in. With the help of seemingly casual sips of coffee, I began: “As long as we are unburdening ourselves about such matters—”

“Is that what we’re doing? You could have fooled me.”

“—I have a confession to make. That winning wager I made on the fixed World Series. I, ah, bet your book collection. The inventory I did for the public library, I mean. Butte bookies are used to strange collateral.”

“Of course you did, nitwit. How else were you going to put up a stake like that?”

My coffee nearly went into my beard. I sputtered, “You knew? All along?”

“That’s the trouble with you bunkhouse geniuses,” he waved away my soul-baring disclosure. “You think nobody else has a clue about what’s going on.”

“You—you’re not angry?”

“If I lost my temper every time you did something, I’d be going off like Old Faithful, wouldn’t I.” He heaved himself to his feet. “Better get your beauty rest, bronc buster. You don’t get to show off in a parade every day. Tomorrow you have to get down to business and give that Chicago scissorbill something to think about. Heh, heh.”

•   •   •

Despite its name, the Purity Cafeteria seemed to me the apt spot to inaugurate playing dirty with Cutthroat Cartwright, in council with Jared and, of course, Rab, amid the hurly-burly of food fetching and wholesale dining where we would not be suspected of anything except runaway appetites. Sandison informed me he would be putting in late hours at the public library for some time to come, so I was furloughed from supper duty at the manse anyway. Perfectly free to follow the edict of the Earldom of Hell, if I had the courage. I was nervous, not to say a novice, at plotting of this sort. Threatening harm to another human being, even an Anaconda hired gun—I had to regard Cutlass as such, just as much as if he were blazing away at me, so to speak, with pistol and torch—did not come naturally to me. A show of brass knuckles when danger stared at me face-to-face had always been as far as I was prepared to go. Now, though, the Highliner’s authoritative, “If that’s how you want to plan your funeral, it’s your choice” rang in me like the opening bell of a boxing match. Wasn’t I merely counterpunching, in the effective style of a certain lightweight champion of the world? Casper never shrank from hitting back, and he won nearly every time. Nearly.

Beaming, the plump bow-tied proprietor greeted me as an old customer the moment I entered the Purity. “I hope you brought your appetite. You’re in luck, tonight’s special is Dublin Gulch filet,” by which he meant corned beef and cabbage. He knew his business in more ways than one, having made peace with the fact that Butte was a union town by posting prominent notices that the enterprise hired only members of the Cooks and Dishwashers Brotherhood, and always welcoming Jared and other union leaders as though he were an honorary member of their number. Accordingly, the cafeteria was where the Hill ate when it went downtown for an evening out, and it took me a minute to spy Jared and Rab in the crowded room, she naturally spotting me first and waving like a student who knew the answer. I could certainly have used one.

I waited until the three of us had been through the serving line and were seated with heaped plates of corned beef and cabbage before broaching the topic of Cutthroat Cartwright. Rab listened sharp-eared as if she were at a keyhole, while Jared chewed on his Irish filet mignon as well as what I was saying in roundabout fashion. When I was done citing Sandison and counterpunching and otherwise trying to put the best appearance on the topic, he asked, poker-faced, “So what is it you and Sam the Strangler want us to do, Professor? Drop Cartwright down a glory hole some dark night?”

“Mr. Morgan!” Thrilled as a schoolgirl but trying to stay proper as a teacher, Rab examined me with fresh eyes. “You really want”—detention school language came to the fore at a time like this—“his block knocked clean off?”

“No, no, I didn’t say that,” I protested guiltily. This conversation was veering uncomfortably close to the memory of my brother’s long walk off a short pier. “I’m merely suggesting giving Cutthroat a taste of what might happen to him if he keeps trying to live up to his nickname at my expense. It would be good for him.” Not to mention, for me.

Veteran of life-and-death battles far beyond my experience, Jared considered the mission. “Tempting to give him the works, though, isn’t it. Twice now the ones he fronts for have tried to put you where you’d be pushing up daisies. That’s asking for it.” When Rab, her conspiratorial nature notwithstanding, had to exclaim at that, he winked it away. “Trench talk, is all. You should have heard us sit around in the mud all the time and discuss what we’d like to do to the Kaiser, too.”

Glancing around casually one more time to make sure we were not being overheard, he got down to business. “It sounds to me, Professor, that you’re prescribing a dose of muscle for our friend Cartwright.”

“Uhm, within reason. A taste.”

“Tsk,” he pulled that oh-so-straight face again, “where ever will I find lugs of that kind in Butte? I’ll have to look long and hard, don’t you think? Especially in Dublin Gulch around Quin’s old neighborhood.” He brushed his hands. “It’s settled. He wants to play tough, we’ll show that conniving—”

“No army language now that you’re a senator, remember,” Rab sweetly admonished.

“Chicago scissorbill,” I filled the blank for him.

“—that, too,” Jared blithely added the term to the military pile, “that he can’t use you for target practice.” He leaned across the table toward me, reaching aside for Rab’s wrist as he did so to hold her attention in more ways than one. “Professor, we’re going to need you and your editorials more than ever,” his words were quiet and stronger for that. “Hard times are coming fast now. People did themselves proud thumbing their nose at the lockout yesterday, but it won’t be long until kids start going hungry and women are scavenging coal down by the tracks and the men start to get antsy about no work and no pay.” I thought he could not have summed up the gamble any better: “Anaconda holds the cards—we have to stay in the game any way we can until they fold.”

“Or there’s a draw,” Rab anted her two bits in. “Rome was not won in a day, a wise teacher I once had used to say.”

Sudden interest in my corned beef and cabbage let me duck that, while Jared sighed mightily. “Up against the cardsharp I’m married to and some earful in Latin, am I. Lucky thing Russian Famine is on my side—throw that left hook until it makes them dizzy, isn’t that the ticket, Professor?”

“By the way,” curiosity was getting the better of me, “where is our star athlete? Surely he hasn’t lost his appetite?”

With a little crimp of concern between her eyes, Rab checked the large wall clock with PURITY IS SURETY FOR GOOD FOOD! across its face. “Selling his papers down to the last scrap, I expect. But it’s not like him to miss a mea—”

Just then the proprietor came bustling toward us from the front of the cafeteria, and inasmuch as I was going to be a regular customer, I tried to get ready whatever compliment corned beef and cabbage was owed.

“Your boy!” he cried as he came up to our table. “He’s outside, somebody worked him over!”

We rushed out, Rab in the lead. Sagging against the building as if on his last legs was Russian Famine, clothes torn, face bruised and nose running with a mix of blood and snot, and his Thunder newspaper bag showing dirty footprints where it had been stomped on.

Before we could even ask, he spat out through bloody lips the word Posties. Painfully he wiped his lips. “Bigger ’n me. Three of ’em run me off my corner. One of ’em held me and the other two whaled me.” He did not quite meet the gaze of the furious Rab, freshly attacking him with a wetted handkerchief to dab away blood and such, or Jared’s deep frown. “They didn’t like it that we was in the parade.”

I asked weakly, “The left hook didn’t . . . ?”

The beat-up boy shrugged thin shoulders. “Wasn’t enough,” he reported, trying to hold back tears. “I’d no sooner get one of ’em knocked down good than the other two’d pile in on me from the other side.”

Three against one were simply too high odds, all right, yet I felt I had failed him. Rab was inveighing against the Post’s junior auxiliary of brutes and vowing to give the chief of police a piece of her mind about hoodlumism running wild in the streets when Jared, hands on knees as he leaned down to the beating victim, spoke up.

“You did the best you could, we know that. Now it’s time to get you out of the line of fire, trooper. We’ll put you on the carriage route.”

“That?”

The boy’s quick cry of despair was painful to hear, but Jared’s reasoning was hard to argue with. The Thunder was most swiftly delivered to newsstands and cigar stores and similar vendors in the middle of downtown by way of a baby carriage stacked full of newspapers, a trick Armbrister had picked up on one of his journalistic stops. That safe route literally would save Famine’s hide, with no bloody corners to be fought over. Wiping his nose with the back of his hand, the teary youngster mumbled something.

Rab was instantly attentive. “What? Famine, tell us.”

“Makes me feel like a sissy.”

“Never mind.” That came firmly from Jared. “The carriage route will keep you on the job, and that’s what counts, right?” Famine mumbled, “Whatever you say goes.” Jared rewarded him with an encouraging grip on the shoulder, then decisively turned to me. “And we’ll move on that other matter prontissimo, Professor,” he said grimly. “It’s time the other side licked a wound or two.”

•   •   •

Sick at heart over Russian Famine’s beating, feeling I had let him down in the boxing lessons, I knew nothing to do but watch and wait for some better turn of fortune in the days that followed. It was a tense time, with the feel of something major about to happen, some storm about to break, but there was no telling when. After the mile-high, mile-deep amplitude of the Fourth of July parade, Butte fell as quiet as if it had temporarily lost its voice. The mute mines of the lockout stood as empty as ever, an apprehensive stillness blanketing the neighborhoods as foraging food for the table and scrounging coal for the stove became the daily challenges of households without paychecks. Even speakeasies were subdued, according to my newsroom colleagues, where clots of miners speculated in low tones what would befall them if the union could not withstand Anaconda’s ruthless shutdown. Out in the prairie towns and tawny ranchlands, the standoff was being watched as a prelude to the statewide vote on Jared Evans’s brainchild, the tax commission that at long last would fix a price tag onto Montana’s copper collar. High stakes, great issues, which to my and Armbrister’s surprise the Post continued to tiptoe past in the immediate days after the parade, an editorial quietus from Cutlass as baffling as his passing up the chance to ripely reminisce about Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders’ conquest of San Juan Hill.

At first I wondered whether my foe had indeed met his fate in a bottomless mine pit, but when I cautiously sounded out Jared on that, he only smiled mysteriously and said, “Don’t concern yourself, the scissorbill is still in one piece.” The battle of words had only paused, in short. Meanwhile, I actually had leisure to write AOT editorials about matters other than the eternal battle over the Richest Hill on Earth—“spitwads,” Armbrister cackled over such offerings, just enough impact to them to annoy the opposition with our persistent presence.

In this lull, Sandison alone seemed to thrive, resuming his post at the public library like a potentate returning from exile. “He’s here at all hours,” Smithers of the periodical desk confided to me when I stopped by to check on the impatient patient, “and not the least little thing anywhere in the building escapes him, I tell you.” Imagining Miss Runyon like a rabbit under the gaze of a hawk, I tried to keep a straight face. Smithers, a lively sort, was in his element as confidant. “And get this. When the janitor left the other night, he heard our man Sandison in his office singing ‘The Bluebells of Scotland.’ Out loud! It’s a changed place around here, Morrie.”

So was the manse, a changed place not necessarily for the better without my sole companion clomping around in old boots and pajamas early and late.

Often now it was near midnight when I would hear a taxi putt-putting up to the front door, and the sounds of someone more than sizable retiring for the night. At breakfast, Sandison would eat heartily as a cowboy, questioning me about any sign of Anaconda weakening on the lockout and grunting whenever I asked him the state of his health or that of the Butte Public Library, then off he went, still listing several degrees to his wounded side but as functioning as a locomotive. Leaving me with the echoing house and its principality of unoccupied rooms, as if I were some fairy-tale figure under a strange spell. Prince of an empty manse, with his princess fled.

•   •   •

“It’s you, is it.” Answering my knock, Grace peeped the door open as warily as if I were about to storm the boardinghouse. “The famous trick rider. What brings you to our humble neighborhood?”

“I came to see if I can help out.”

“I can’t think how,” the reply came swifter than swift. “We don’t need any fights fixed or names fiddled with, thanks just the same.”

I flinched, but did not give up. “Grace, please. Couldn’t a little money be put to use, perhaps?”

Her expression warmed one degree, from skepticism to suspicion. “I hate to ask, but is it honestly gotten?”

“Positively.” I reached in my pocket and produced the thin fold of bills. “Sandy had a fit of conscience and upped his rent somewhat. That’s where this comes from, I swear on a hill of Bibles.”

Keeping one hand on the doorknob, Grace still eyed the money dubiously. “He opened his wallet, just like that? Tell me another.”

“I prompted him a wee bit,” I admitted. Which prompting, in truth, had been met by the Sandisonian grumble, “When I gave you this place, I didn’t expect you to turn into a gouging landlord. Oh, well, leave it to you to get blood out of a Scotchman. Here.”

Back and forth between being shrewd landlady and aggrieved spouse, Grace bit her underlip, but the next thing I knew, the cash had vanished into her apron pocket. “All right then. It will come in handy. Good day, Morrie.”

“Wait. I wanted to ask—” What I wanted went beyond words, to the essence of man and woman and life altogether, the constellation of chance that draws us one to another out of the lonely depths of night. Try speaking that to an unwilling listener, especially one you are only nominally married to. I instead pleaded: “Can I come in? Only for a minute? I feel like a leper, standing out here.”

Wordlessly she swung the door open and pointed to the parlor. “Make it quick. What was it you wanted to ask?”

“If I can borrow Hoop and Griff. The kitchen drain is leaking again.”

“I’ll send them first thing in the morning.” She looked at me questioningly. “Is that all, I hope?”

“Did you enjoy the parade?”

Grace closed her eyes as if seeking strength. “You. Can you not get it into your head, Morrie, that you can’t come mooning around here and win me back with sweet nothings? Too much has happened.” Blinking now, the violet of her gaze hazed a little with moisture, she said huskily, “Just go. Please.”

“Grace, can’t we—” Such a thumping broke out overhead, I feared for the ceiling. “What’s making the awful racket?”

“Oh, that,” she said as though the commotion were nothing. “Giorgio at his exercises. He does jumping jacks. Lifts a dumbbell.”

I somehow held my tongue about the aptness of that word associated with the Mazzini creature. My turn to be highly suspicious.

“How is he paying his rent? There are no wages these days.”

“On the cuff. You would let him do the same,” she maintained entirely inaccurately. “He can catch up on the rent when the mines are running again.”

“Not much of a provider until that day ever comes, is he,” I took what little satisfaction jealousy would allow me.

The jumping or dumbbelling or whatever it was went on above us as we stood looking at each other helplessly. Grace was the first to say anything. “Morrie, what’s going to happen? I don’t mean with us. That’s—” She washed her hands of the topic. “The lockout and all, what can make Anaconda ever back down?”

“Jared and I are putting every effort to it.” Unspoken was the fact that our every effort so far had left the greatest copper mines in the world shut tight as a drum.

Tight-lipped, she nodded. From her expression, I could tell that there luckily was not more.

•   •   •

My mood weighed down by wife, lockout, Cutlass, manse, and anything else that came to mind, I retreated from the boardinghouse one more time. Deep in brooding as I started home without even Sandison to look forward to, I let traffic thoroughly pass so the next turn of events would not be, say, getting run over by a Golden Eggs truck.

As I crossed the street thinking the coast was clear, traffic of an unanticipated sort emerged as a pram came trundling out of Venus Alley, simultaneous with a covey of streetwalkers sashaying to their posts for the night. Bent low behind the laden baby carriage, pushing for all he was worth on the uphill street while the ladies of the evening kidded the pants off him, in a manner of speaking, was a depressed Russian Famine. Misery famously loving company, on impulse I changed direction to accompany him as he distributed the Thunder.

“Hiya, sir,” he greeted me disconsolately, his ears burning. “Come to hear the canaries sing?”

“Ooh la la, what’s under that beard, hon?” a buxom redhead in minimum street apparel squealed at the sight of me. “I bet you been just waiting for the barbershop special.”

Quite sure she did not mean a shave and a haircut, I declined the offer, to a round of catcalls from the Venus Alley sisterhood as they stationed themselves along the block. My ears now the red ones, I joined Famine in a concerted stint of pushing that propelled the buggy and us out of the red light district into a calmer neighborhood of speakeasies and funeral parlors.

As the street turned less precipitous, I let him commandeer the conveyance by himself again. Brushing my hands, I asked as cheerily as I could, “The daughters of Venus aside, how goes the carriage route? At least, you only have to drop the papers at each place and collect for them, am I right?”

“Yeah,” he said grudgingly. “It’s slow nickels instead of fast dimes, though,” he gave the classic response of the frustrated earner.

I had to smile. “Sometimes something comes along and changes that. Luck, for a better word.” He eyed me as if it had better hurry up. “Do you mind if I walk with you? I’d like the company.”

“Nah. Help yourself.” Strenuous as his task was, he managed to jounce along typically, every part of him on the move. I fell into step, and that seemed to loosen his mood. “You get that way, too, huh?”

I was startled. “Pardon?”

“Down in the dumps,” he specified. “You sorta look like you lost your best friend.”

An apt enough description of the situation with Grace. “Yes, well,” I alibied, “I have some things on my mind and I suppose it shows.” I shifted the conversation. “I’ve been meaning to ask, to offer, really.” Guilty as I felt, this was hard to get out. “Wouldn’t you like more boxing lessons? A left hook isn’t the only weapon to be had.”

“It sure ain’t,” he blurted, glancing sideways at me in apology. “Sir, sorry as all get out, but I’m gonna call it quits on the boxing.” He added bitterly, “’Least until I get some meat on my bones and any muscles.”

“Famine, we’ve been through this,” I tried to lift his spirits. “You’re blessed with speed.”

“So’s jackrabbits, and all kinds of things get them,” he said in the same dark mood.

“Mine isn’t the only case of the dumps, hmm?” I jogged him lightly. “I’ll tell you what, let’s make a bargain to quit feeling sorry for ourselves the rest of your route. Then we can go back to being worrywarts. Agreed?”

That got a rise out of him. “I ain’t no—” He caught himself. “Yeah, well, maybe I do have too much stuff on my mind, like you say you do. How we supposed to get rid of that?”

“Let’s talk about something else. Tell me,” I flipped my fedora off my head and held it the way a magician holds a hat full of magic, “if I could pull out Russian Famine, grown and muscled and with meat on his bones, what more would you want to be?”

The old schoolhouse trick worked. The boy brightened, and in between dashes to deliver stacks of newspapers while I held the baby buggy from rolling half a mile downhill, he confided that his great dream in life was to be a trainman, on the famous silk trains that rushed the delicate cargo from the port of Seattle across the breadth of the country to the mills of New Jersey. “Run the locomotive, how about,” he enthused during one scampering return, pushing the lightened carriage so fast I had to skip to keep up. “Highball ’er as fast as she’d go,” his imagination was already up in the cab of a cannonball express, whistle screeching as the wheels pounded the rails, no other sound on earth like it. I had to concede it was a dream with a certain appeal. He confided out of the side of his mouth, “Them trains got the right of way all across the country, you know. Don’t stop for crossings or nothing, just let ’er rip. Wouldn’t that be something?”

I could agree with that. Yet the vision of another young dreamer with extraordinary physical skills would not leave me. Casper had wanted to be a street preacher in Chicago’s Bughouse Square before awakening to his body’s possibilities. “Don’t take this wrong, my friend,” experience spoke up in me, “but you are destined for higher things than that.”

“Awful nice of you to say so, sir,” he sobered, coming down to earth where the wheels of the baby carriage met the hard streets of Butte, “but that don’t help getting chased off my corner and putting up with the hussies.”

Before I could try to buck him up from that, we were at the last stop, Blind Heinie’s newsstand outside the Hennessy Building. “I’m kinda late,” Famine apologized, with a look at me as he hurriedly scooped newspapers from the bottom of the baby carriage and stacked them within practiced reach of the grizzled old man.

“Alles forgive, Jungchen,” the news vendor assured him with a guttural chuckle. As I went on my way and Russian Famine trundled the carriage back on the same route we had come, the sweet words lingered in my ear, the benediction we all seek in the winding journey of life, young and old alike.

•   •   •

It is a measure of how low my domestic subsistence had sunk that a cafeteria became my salvation. Bachelor life soon drove me to regularly staying on late at the newspaper and then eating at the Purity before facing another evening alone at home, to call the manse that. Even with the city on hard times, there was definitely no lack of clientele because fetching a meal for oneself felt like a bargain whether or not it actually added up to one. I suppose it was not a good sign—bachelor habit setting deep—that every suppertime without fail I headed directly for the counter where pasties were stacked in a warming pan and fed myself as mindlessly as a dray horse going to a feedbag.

Thus came the evening when I was dishing up my favorite fare, a plump, crusty pasty and the Purity’s tasty gravy, when I felt a presence. The way a shadow across your path can cause a sudden chill. Or a window man can be sensed rather than seen. I turned my head ever so slightly.

Practically next to me, there stood Cartwright, with a cutthroat smile that more than lived up to that nickname. Slick dresser that he was, he had on a pearl-gray suit and matching vest with a silken lavender tie that was more properly a cravat. Before I could react to his sudden presence, he slapped me on the shoulder and said in a louder voice than necessary, “How’s the world treating you, buddy?”

Nudging his tray up to mine, he looked over the meal line offerings as if I weren’t the real thing on his menu. “Pork chop sandwich?” he whistled in disbelief. “They eat anything in this burg, don’t they?” Then ever so casually, he dropped all pretense. “You danced circles around me with that editorial today, I have to hand it to you. Sheer razzmatazz. You’re one whiz at wordslinging, you are.”

I made to move away, leaving him with the rebuff: “Really, we have nothing to say to each other except in print.” But he plucked at my sleeve, smiling all the while.

“Oh, I think we do,” his voice practically oozed fellowship. “Especially since this seems to be the only way at you.” He flexed his upper parts, the cannonball head to one side then the other, as if working kinks out of his neck. “Boy oh boy, that Evans of yours knows his stuff. A couple of Irish miners, both of them pretty far above my weight class, pushed me around a little the other night. I was given the impression you’re a privileged character, and if anything happened to you, I’d get plenty more of the same.” He gave me another unwelcome pat on the shoulder. “There, see? We have a lot in common. We both want to keep breathing. And it’d surprise you how well that can pay.”

His close presence was making me uncomfortable, as well as his gall in trying to bribe me in public. “You can save some of that breath. I told you before, I’m not for sale.”

The damnable man laughed as if we were sharing the best joke. “You don’t know your own worth, my friend. You can name your own price. What could be sweeter?”

“Strychnine.”

I uttered that in spite of the vision of my satchel stuffed with money once more. The Anaconda Copper Mining Company had even more of it to spare than did Chicago gamblers.

Cartwright’s eyes hardened, although he kept up the deadly geniality. “Butte rules take some getting used to,” he lamented. “These miners don’t know when they’re licked. But you’re not that kind of dumb cluck. Cash in while you can. Throw some moolah at that run-down monastery you live in. Go on a nice long trip somewhere.” He cocked a look at me. “Morgan? You still with me? What the devil are you doing?”

“Merely humming ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ while waiting for a nuisance to go away.”

He snickered. “Smarting off isn’t going to help. Come on, get with it. People already think you sold out, so you might as well.” I looked sharply at him. “Just the two of us palsy-walsy in public like this does the trick,” he said almost sympathetically. “Word gets around, you know.”

A rapid glance around the dining room verified that all too well; people were watching us, too many of them with the rough cut of miners. Up at the front, the proprietor was monitoring matters with a double-chinned frown. As sure as anything, even if the word did not spread some other way, he would inform Jared of my seeming duplicity. Jared I might explain this away to, but others, the union core and the faithful readership of the Thunder, would be left with a distinctly wrong impression: that I had sold out to the other side.

“Just in case you need any more convincing,” Cartwright leaned in as if the conversation had reached the confidential point, “there are some, shall we say, Anaconda associates out in the crowd. They’re making sure people notice us being chummy.” My knees went weak. Goons, even in here? “Naw, don’t bother to look around,” my antagonist advised in a cheery tone. “If they’re doing their job, you can’t spot them. Window men, we call types like that back in Chicago—who knows what the term is out here in the sticks, huh?”

The next blow came as a casual afterthought. “Oh, and by the way, they tail me to make sure I don’t meet with any kind of accident.” Cartwright rocked back on his heels. “We’re really some pair, aren’t we, you and me? Two newspaper guys who get to call the shots on something that counts, for a change. Cream rises to the top, why not?” The spiel was practically purring out of him now. “The only trouble is, we’ve worked ourselves to a draw. I can’t touch you, and your union henchmen can’t touch me. A standoff like that”—he spread his hands as if juggling—“you may as well take what you can get and retire in style. Well, that’s the setup anyway.” He beamed me a final smile that his eyes had nothing to do with. “You know where to find me when you want to cut yourself a nice fat deal. Don’t let me keep you from your meal, pal.”

I found my voice as he started to turn to go.

“Wait.”

“Cutty”—he perked up at my use of that—“have you tried the Butte specialty, a pasty?” With that, I lifted my plate and mashed it squarely into his chest where cravat, vest, and suit met.

For an incredulous moment Cartwright gaped at the dripping mess of gravy, mashed potatoes, and such plastered on his chest, while I rid myself of the plate. “You—” He drew back to hit me, but froze at the sight of my brass knuckles. Rather, the flash of brass as I whipped them from my side pockets in immediate readiness stopped him cold, but then he simply stared as I held my stance. Instinctively I had dropped into the fighting pose practiced with Russian Famine. Casper’s old pose.

As the Purity proprietor bustled toward us with a moonfaced grin, calling to the kitchen for someone to bring a mop, Cartwright backed off, but he was not the kind to give much ground. Still eyeing me, he said silkily, “Handy with your mitts, are you. You’re full of surprises, Morgan. But round one isn’t the whole fight, you know. Better wise up and think over my offer.” Dabbing at his ruinously splotched suit with a napkin, he gave me one last smooth smile. “It still stands.”

•   •   •

“I hear you had quite a chat with Cutlass.” Jared was waiting when I next arrived at work, after the weekend, with Armbrister attentively on hand.

“He trapped me,” I sighed. I explained that in true Cutthroat fashion he wanted to make it appear that the two of us were in cahoots, obviously bought off. The pursed expressions on my listeners caused me to pause. “Which I hope did not work whatsoever.”

Jared faced me squarely. “Professor, I don’t doubt your word. Besides, Rab would beat up on me if I did. You were caught in a bad situation, as you say, and you wiggled out of it, by all reports. Good enough.” Now he paused. “Although you might have tossed that grub on him a little sooner.”

He cut off my protest. “That’s that, all right? We’ve got other things to worry about. I’m heading to Helena to hold the governor’s hand, he’s getting the heebie-jeebies about when the lockout is ever going to end. Can’t really blame him, I’m having a few of those myself.” He said it in droll enough fashion, for a man who had turned himself into a lightning rod under the menacing cloud of Anaconda. “Hold the fort, gents,” he left us with, off to catch the train to Ulcer Gulch.

Armbrister still was looking sour about Cartwright. “Conniving bastard to do that to you,” he gave the matter one last mutter. “All right, let’s get back to making hay. I’ve been busy with Cavaretta, trying to figure out new ways to say no progress on the lockout. Please tell your suffering editor you aren’t stuck for editorial ammo, too.”

“Have no fear.” By staying late as much as I had, I’d managed to work ahead; there was at least that to be said for doldrums at the manse. “I have blasts of various velocity against Anaconda ready to go in overset, slugged for each day this week. I wanted to surprise you with some good news for a change.”

Turning into Generalissimo Prontissimo, he shooed me off to fetch them for him immediately. “Morgie, nothing you do surprises me. Let’s see the little wonders, so I can slap headlines on them and get them set. Damn,” he said with relish, “it’s going to be nice to get back to tearing the hide off the Post, no more spitwads.”

•   •   •

But when both newspapers rolled off the presses the next day, I was the one who felt as if I were missing some skin. I had written an editorial I quite liked, to the effect that the smokeless skies over the tight-shut Hill were a clear indication of Anaconda’s undue power, concluding:

When one lordly company can turn the actual atmosphere of an entire city, of a whole state, on and off at will, it is the very reverse of heavenly. It is satanic.

—PLUVIUS

As if by divination, the Post trotted out an old argument in favor of the smudge of belching smokestacks, of course with a certain Chicago flourish:

There are certain starry-eyed types who seem to believe that the Hill will produce its copper just by wishing, instead of basic economics. We’ve said it before, we’ll say it again, we’ll repeat it until the daydreamers grow ears as long as the jackass variety: the scent of smoke from working factories, such as the Hill’s when the costs of labor and the rewards of corporate investment are in economic balance, is the smell of money, wages, prosperity. You only have to be smart enough to sniff.

—CUTLASS

•   •   •

“The scissorbill seems to have looked out the window at the blue sky the same time you did,” Sandison needlessly pointed out to me when I fumed to him over the sparring editorials, round one handily to Cartwright. “Either that or he’s reading your mind, heh.”

That began the longest week of my newspaper career. In humiliating Cutthroat Cartwright the way I did at the Purity, I apparently roused him to the peak of his not inconsiderable journalistic talents. Day after day, edition after edition, my carefully thought-out editorials looked lame in comparison to his masterpieces of anticipation; suddenly his were the thunderous dispatches to the readers of Butte. Talk about humiliation. I felt almost as if I had been called onstage by a sly magician, told to shuffle a deck of cards and cut them, and every time he named off my bottom card without looking. Razzmatazz had deserted me and found a home with him. I won’t say I was cowed by Cartwright’s supernatural show of ability, but for the first time I had to wonder if I belonged in the wordslinging profession.

In that frame of mind, I came home from the newspaper one otherwise fine day to find the front-porch drainpipe being lustily repaired. “What do you know for sure, Morrie?” Griff called out heartily. Too heartily. “Isn’t this weather something?” Hoop followed that with, just as full of false cheer.

My mood sank farther toward my shoe tops. If rheumatic old miners were feeling sorry for me, I had to be even worse off than I’d thought. Brooding my way past the pair of them, I stopped on impulse. “You’re regular readers of the Thunder, am I right?”

“Oh, yeah, sure. Most definitely,” came the chorus.

“And you’re familiar with the Post since the advent of Cutlass, yes?”

They cautiously admitted to looking at the Anaconda rag now and then.

“So you’ve no doubt been following his most recent editorials.”

They looked back and forth uneasily. “Been on kind of a tear, hasn’t he,” Hoop finally came up with. “Strutting his stuff, a person would have to say,” Griff added.

“And mine, lately?”

“A little falling off, maybe,” said Griff.

“Just a little. Got to read close to see it,” said Hoop.

“So much for vox populi,” I muttered, and went on up the steps. They glanced up as I passed, the last word coming from Griff:

“You asked.”

•   •   •

At the Thunder, Armbrister wasn’t saying anything, although the gloom evident beneath the green eyeshade bespoke plenty. When Jared returned from trying to settle down the governor, he looked unsettled himself by the Thunder’s recent editorial performance.

“We’re gradually losing ground, Professor,” an understatement if there ever was one. “I’m hearing mutters from the Hill that maybe we’ve pushed Anaconda too far. What’s wrong with the company making enough money to pay people to work, even some of the miners who’ve stuck with the union through thick and thin are asking me.” He rubbed his short ear as if such questioning had done the damage. “I’m sensing we don’t have much time to turn this around,” he said somberly. “Morrie”—his use of my actual name said volumes about how serious a fix we were in—“I don’t have to tell you to do your best. But pull out all the stops in taking on this Cartwright hoodoo, all right?”

Sound advice, but I knew nothing to do but compile another several days’ worth of my most imaginative efforts to be typeset, Armbrister outdoing himself with the flaming headlines he added. At the end of that awful week, though, I took home with me to Sandison, Ajax, and the manse the paralyzing sense that Cutlass could outguess, outmaneuver, outwrite me anytime he wanted. And that was not the worst.

•   •   •

Sunday morning, the plump weekend newspapers spread around Sandison and me at the breakfast table. Prominent of course was the editorial matchup, mine yet another dogged invocation of the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt against malefactors of great wealth, and Cutlass’s, alas, mocking a certain unnamed critic of the American way of business who blew the same limited tune on the same tin whistle time after time. I brooded into my coffee while Sandison was sopping up syrup with the last of his hotcakes and squinting critically at the side-by-side editorials. “Foxed you again, it looks like,” he unnecessarily announced. “He’s on quite a streak.” A prim eater for someone of his girth, he dabbed with his napkin lest any trace of breakfast find its way into his beard. “What’s this Cutlass character look like?”

Bitterly I described the Chicago sheen of the man, outdressing me as well as outguessing me.

“Hmm. Hmm.” I looked at him curiously. “Think I spotted him in the Reading Room yesterday,” Sandison drawled. “Took his hat off to read—didn’t strike me as the Butte type who wanders in to kill time until the speakeasies open. After he left, I went down and asked Miss Runyon what he’d looked up. She didn’t pay me any mind at first, claimed he was obviously a gentleman in town on business. Silly old bat.” He snorted. “She thinks any male who gives her the time of day is Prince Charming. Had to tell her he looked to me like he might be a snipper. That sent her flying off to what he’d asked for, which turned out to be in the bound newspapers.” His frosty eyebrows raised the dreaded question before he did. “The Chicago Tribune for July 1909. Mean anything to you?”

My life, was all.